Note: This was me trying to understand some things about the Season 12 finale (Neverland) and the first two episodes of Season 13 (Stop the Bleeding and Personal Day.) Character study. General spoilers, usual disclaimer.
Never Learned
1. Neverland
Is this how it happens? A young voice, a familiar, impossible face. For the first time, he reacts too slowly, watches numbly before reaching for his weapon, too slow...
"Agent Gibbs?"
Crack. And he knows he has been a fool.
Crack. And he knows what kind of martyr he is.
On his back, he looks down the barrel of the gun and sees himself.
He has his reasons. He makes his inquiries. No one stops him, least of all the NIS agent, Franks, to whom he will be drawn as a moth to a flame because of what he is about to do.
His agony is not expunged, but steps have been taken. Something has been done instead of nothing. The red mist clears, he can think again, and the rage that would not have ended with his own death concedes the point and withdraws for long intervals.
After that day, he seldom admits to himself when he's acting on vestigial, violent impulse, when he is succumbing to the call of a primitive and barbarous nature. When it's done he is minted, a shiny new Agent, safe and sound under the color of law.
By the time he sees the warning signs there's nothing he can do. He reinvents, not very successfully. By the time the cycle begins again, he knows there's nothing he could have done. He manages to gather to himself a group of adult orphans who insulate him not only by their solitary natures but through their belief in his virtue. Hypocrisy threatens to rise up and strangle him, because he enjoys the certainty of going unseen, has long understood the peculiar blindness of others when the glamour holds cover over him. He has always known when he is going to get away with it. He feels it, the sixth sense in his gut, which is no myth, and which doesn't operate as capriciously as the well-intended world wants believe. Sometimes it's as solid as a rock.
He beats his guilt into submission. Knowledgeable people look with relief to his training, compassionate ones to his past. In the hard light of day, both are excuses, but Gibbs doesn't live in the hard light of day.
He is rooted out by the Reynosas, by Merton Bell and Allison Hart, by Vance and by a tearful Abby, and even so, the glamour holds. Only Tony isn't dazzled. They are in the plane, coming back from Mexico, and DiNozzo is visibly angry. No one but Gibbs sees how dangerous Tony is, or how much danger he is in, for while Tony wears his feelings on his sleeve, he keeps his reasons to himself.
Make sure someone knows your reason, DiNozzo. Your reason will keep you safe.
It's cynical, a lie. He should confess it, like an impure thought, but that will never do. Tony doesn't admire criminality. He's constitutionally incapable.
Not only that, but years have passed during which Tony has had plenty to worry about. His partner is a physical and emotional batterer. He saves her life.
Ziva eventually takes Gibbs' worst lessons to heart, and her pride and duplicity do not offend him as they once did. He doesn't stop her and neither does Vance. Gibbs keeps Tony out of it until the end, until he can't control him anymore. Whatever is in it for him, Tony faces it by himself, and Gibbs knows his simmering rage at DiNozzo is misplaced, a projection.
Sergei Mishnev is caught but not arrested. It isn't Gibbs who shoots him, but Fornell is only hours out of a drunk, and Gibbs stands at his side while he pulls the trigger.
Gibbs throws in with McGee, as if DiNozzo won't notice. Maybe it's apples and oranges, but because it's permanently unsettling to have attained the worship of a better, less sentimental person than himself, Gibbs doesn't forgive Tony, who will deny the allegations anyway, if in vain.
Now Gibbs is lying in the dirt. His chest feels heavy, wet and solid. The pain in his knee is like a torch, or a sun that refuses to blind him. He sees the dead eyes of the ten-year-old automaton who has brought him down, who has leveled his pride like nothing he can remember.
This is what he's been working up to for the last twenty-odd years. He supposes part of him planned it this way. As a tribute to his daughter it is errant - this stubborn, unfactual belief in the purity of children. It is his most cherished delusion, here to extract its price. For some reason it's only now clear she wouldn't have wanted it this way.
He has told DiNozzo to stay put. Tony is racing across the square, and Gibbs knows without doubt he is the kind of martyr who takes other people down with him.
Has that been intentional too, or a premonition? Whatever it is, it isn't fair. He's hurt, maybe dying - he'll know soon - and DiNozzo will live with it. He remembers Ziva never tiring of calling Tony a man without pride, but DiNozzo is a rarer creature: he is someone who allows his pride to suffer. It's on his face - the hot fear, the guilt and pain, the stirrings of a crushing, inextinguishable sorrow.
It isn't supposed to be this way, can only have been this way, and Gibbs thinks that if others have tested Tony's mettle, his love, he has subverted it, all to the same fruitless end. This isn't the first time he's pushed this good man off his six, but it may be the last.
On this thought the pain gains entry, and he blacks out as DiNozzo reaches him.
2. Stop the Bleeding
"Boss, can you hear me?" Tony calls. They're going to take care of you, Boss."
Mike intrudes, making cracks about the doctor, being a useless old fart, another delusion come home to roost.
"Shut up, Mike." Maybe it's the morphine kicking in, but either way Gibbs is sick of the unrealities, as much as of the pain that has kept him alive so long.
Franks has become a bit of a bore, an echo of acts Gibbs knows to be his own. He created this Mike when he fired that first extracurricular bullet, and now the sonofabitch won't leave him alone.
Just now Gibbs would prefer flesh and blood.
"Where is DiNozzo?
He opens his eyes to stop Franks from filling his ears with more platitudes. It occurs to him he should have thought of this before. He hears voices, music, and he almost despairs. Tony has left. He has been called away, he's gone.
Make sure you have a reason, DiNozzo. It's all you're going to wind up with.
If he lives, he'll find a way to tell him this, or something like it. He's still working on it.
In the end, he'll know when Tony has sniffed out both the truth and the lie. He seems to be able to hold both in his mind, where Gibbs only works with one at a time.
3. Personal Day
Tony is out in the open about protecting Gibbs from himself. He practically congratulates him for not murdering Long, and it's infuriating. It makes DiNozzo the only person he justifies himself to. It makes him want to run.
Maybe Ducky is right and they're both adjusting. Maybe Kelly was right - unfinished business. The encounter with Kelly bothers him.
You spend too much time in the past, Daddy. Gibbs can't argue with this.
It's about the future now. He has no idea what this means. What is the future without the past? What is the future if not death?
If you don't stop the bad people, Daddy, who will? His eight-year-old is saying it's him against the world. It seems at odds with the love of daughter for father, runs counter to the wisdom of the afterlife. Is it the blind faith of a child or his ego running off with what he thinks of as his his moral center? It leaves him feeling cold.
DiNozzo arrives uninvited as Gibbs is packing for San Diego.
"You're not coming with me."
"I know."
Incredibly, Tony has brought a gift. Gibbs smiles, just a little.
"So. Iraq. Are we ever going to talk about it?" Tony isn't asking for permission, he's being obstinate, and Gibbs can feel his isolation.
"This isn't about Iraq. Where are you?"
"I'm right here where I've always been. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't what I wanted," Tony says.
He's looking for kinship, as though he believes they're alike - different in style but with similar architecture, similar material perhaps, but Gibbs isn't feeling it. Kelly has taken that from him, left him lonelier than before, and so he won't accept help from Tony, doesn't give him what he wants. It's the way things have been for a while now. It's the way things are.
"Do you wanna be a leader?" He aims for Tony's gut, speaks directly to the inside of his head. He skips the words other people depend on, the ones that get in the way.
"You mean do I want to be you?"
DiNozzo is fast on his feet these days, but that doesn't stop Gibbs from trying to bury him in sanctimony. "You had a chance. You turned it down."
"It was my decision."
"Job changes all the time, DiNozzo. The reason stays the same. You have a reason or you don't."
Tony doesn't say anything more. The look on his face says he knows Gibbs is talking to himself.
******End*****